Posted
by
timothyon Monday July 03, 2006 @05:24PM
from the one-up-manship dept.

Tom7 writes "This year's ICFP Programming Contest is now open for early registration. This is an annual open competition in which hundreds of teams vie to complete a 3-day programming task over the internet. The organizers have promised that this year's contest will be "very different from past competitions" and will have a theme of "computational archaeolinguistics." In addition to prize money, the winner's programming language is declared the "programming language of choice for discriminating hackers;" previous winners have used Cilk, Haskell, C++ and O'Caml. How will your favorite language fare?"

If you want to write viruses and easy-to-use hacking tools -- yes. Look, Perl is the glue for *nix. However, thanks to Microsoft's object models, VB/VBA/Visual Studio Tools for Office is the probably more the Window hackers tool of choice that many would care to admit. Of course, how many respectable 'hackers' hack Windows?

During the previous contest, the U of C organizers wanted to make sure that the winner used solid programming techniques than spit out a 3-day hack fest. They had contestants make a program - and then after they submitted their program, the rules changed and they had to make additions to their program. Pretty slick if you ask me.

Rewarding hackers who can whip together a slapdash product instead of those who can make a solid, secure, maintainable design.

Congratulations: you win this year's prize for First Person Not To Have A Clue What The ICFP Contest Is Like.

As the other poster has already commented, the ICFP contests are typically designed to favour solid, secure, and mainainable designs. Anyone who jumps in and starts whipping together slapdash code is doomed to fail ignobly.

Teams using Dylan, a dynamic language based on Common Lisp, have done very well in the ICFP.

One reason that Haskell and O'Caml have done very well is they are good vehicles for research into typing, hence very popular in theoretical CS. I bet that's the primary relevance of static vs. dynamic typing. I think if the contest existed twenty years ago, there would have been far more Lisp winners than C and Pascal winners.

Can't wait to win, and finally end all the discussion that BASIC is the ultimate programming language *maniacial laughter. But seriously, do people actually change their choice of programming language for a project because of the title this project gives it?